Indifference is an indicator of a lack of conscience.
Indifference has always frightened me. Indifference is a perfect
breeding ground for hatred. Indifference allows politics of hate to
flourish. And that lays the groundwork for bigotry, racism and hate to
seem reasonable to ordinary human beings. The results of politics of
hate are always horrifying and inevitably catastrophic.

In a couple of decades, when global warming is a serious problem
everywhere, and most people (not just the crazy "alarmists")
are talking about the point of no return, and we are all mourning
what has been irretrievably lost, while trying to deal with the
ever-increasing global chaos, I will look at my
friends, family, and academic colleagues, and they will look at me, and
we will all ask ourselves: How could good people have been so evil? How
could generous
people have been so selfish? How could intelligent
people have been so stupid? How
could kind people have been so cruel? How could courageous
people have been so timid?

By then, it will be too late and too tragic for "I told you so". The window of opportunity will have closed. The
irreversible damage will be done. We won't be able to turn back the
clock and try again.

My children will ask me: Why didn't you do something? Why didn't you
talk to your family, friends, and colleagues? And I will say: I did.
Again and again, in different ways. But even the nicest, kindest, most
honourable people were not listening. Or if they were listening, they were not responding.

Considering the consequences,
this has been the most shocking experience of my life. And the shock is
ongoing. My friends, family, and colleagues will read the previous
paragraph and still won't get it. Nor will they get it after reading
this paragraph, or the next one.

Right now, we can still do something. Will we? Or will we not?

The melting arctic and antarctic and all that other climate stuff is not
only happening on TV and in Facebook. It is part of our world, and we are causing it.
Every
time we drive a fossil-powered car, fly in an aeroplane, eat a steak,
or vote for a political party
that is ignoring or exacerbating this problem, we are contributing
actively to the
destruction of our children's world. Moreover, there is absolutely no
doubt that this is true. Anyone who claims otherwise--and there are enough of those--is lying.

Life is a stage, and we are the players. We are stubbornly acting as if
either climate change was not happening or we were not causing it, or
as if it didn't matter. We
seem determined to fool both ourselves and each other. Our
excuse, perhaps, is that we want to enjoy life as long as it is still
possible. But that doesn't make sense, either.

I am one of the worst sinners, as anyone can see by looking at the long
list of international conferences I have attended during my academic
career. I didn't
get to those conferences by swimming or riding a bike. But a few years
ago I jumped over my own shadow and now I'm doing something about
it.

It's not as difficult as you think. Let me give you some examples.

If you want to cut emissions, the first thing to do is cut
your personal emissions. For most people in rich countries this means:
less driving, less flying and less red meat. I'm doing all three. I
don't possess a car (a bike combined with public transport and the
occasional taxi is quite sufficient), I stopped flying to conferences
in 2015 (there are plenty of interesting conferences to attend in
central Europe anyway), and I don't eat much meat (and don't miss it).
Incidentally, I don't perceive cutting fossil fuel consumption as a
sacrifice. On the contrary, I enjoy riding my bicycle around town
and eating fried
vegetables and rice rather than rump steak. Being climate-friendly can
be good for your health! On trains, I enjoy reading books and admiring
the scenery. Without a car, I don't have to worry about parking spots,
traffic jams, gas stations, car repairs, traffic police, speeding
fines, or constant the risk of injuring or killing someone. If I
seriously need a car, there are always taxis. As for the adventure of
travel - I can spend my holidays in my local region, reserving flying
for
urgent occasions or matters of life and death.

The second thing is to cut emissions in your sphere of
influence. I am an academic and a musician. So those are two spheres of
influence right there. (What are yours?) As an academic I'm trying to
reduce emissions caused by academic conferences. I organised a low-carbon global conference
and I'm trying to convince colleagues in other disciplines to do
something similar. It should be easy, because the new format opens the
conference up to people from all over the world regardless of their
financial means, but many colleagues are slow to respond to this
opportunity. As a musician, I would like to see musicians cut down on
flying. An extraordinary number of orchestras and choirs are flying
around as if there was no tomorrow and pretending not to realise it's a
problem. This behavior has to change.

The third thing is to be politically active in the fight
against climate change. I'm writing this webpage and sending messages
to Facebook. Using social media for this purpose is easy. Try it.

Regarding flying to conferences, a list of like-minded academics is here.
At the time of writing in 2018, I know of no professional
acquaintances--the people I have hung out with at countless academic conferences in the
past--on this list. Of course not everyone knows about it. But
surely most academics could avoid most of their flying if they wanted
to, or if they felt responsible in the way you might expect a
privileged, well-educated person to feel.

I frequently ask myself how best to respond to this situation. Should I
accuse
people of being immoral--not
caring about a billion children in developing countries? Should
I politely ignore the problem, like one of a zillion zombies? Am I allowed
to say that the well-being of a billion children is more important than
research in my academic discipline, or any other? If someone gets
offended by my attempts to address this problem, what is more
important--their feelings or the right to life of a billion people?

My climate-friendly
friends and I are not suffering--not in
the slightest. Compared to the risk of resistance during the
Second World War, to take one example, today's climate resistance is a
trivial matter. But in the end it could be even more important. So why
isn't everyone doing it?

For many, it is not so easy to cut fossil fuel consumption. For
example, you may have little or no access to public transport. But that
is no reason to give up. Electric cars are getting cheaper and better,
as are the solar cells you can use to charge them. There are also
electric bikes and mopeds. In general and regardless of the problem,
everyone has the chance to create their own solution, taking advantage
of available opportunities. Be a pioneer!

Many enjoyable activities don't directly involve fossil fuels at all.
Music is an example--both playing it and listening to it.
Music is more powerful than people realise, and many singers have taken
the liberty of including relevant moral messages in their song lyrics.
Perhaps we should listen to those songs again.

Joni
Mitchell: "You don't know what you've got till it's gone" George Harrison:
"With every mistake we must surely be learning"Bob Dylan: "How
many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't
see?"Tracy Chapman:
"I know I may be wishing on a world that may never be. But I'll keep on
wishing"Michael Jackson:
"If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself
and then make a change"Midnight Oil: "Cause it happens to be an
emergency. Some things aren't meant to be. Some things don't come for
free"
Amanda McBroom & Bette Midler: "Far beneath the bitter
snows
lies the seed that with the sun's love ... becomes the rose"

I especially enjoy the freedom to be able to tell the truth even if it
sometimes disturbs other people. But almost everyone I know has this
freedom, too. Most of us are not living in dangerous dictatorships. So
why are we scared to tell the truth about climate change?
Why are we silently agreeing to ignore the elephant in the room?

Today's biggest human rights issues

Despite progress in many areas, there are still shocking human rights
violations happening in many countries. In fact, right now the
situation seems to be getting worse rather than better. But there is
something that everyone can do: support Amnesty International, read their newsletters, sign their petitions, and participate in their urgent actions.

Taken together, climate change and poverty represent today's worst human rights violations, for two
reasons. First, they violate the most important right - the right
to life. Second, they will affect more people than any other human
rights violation in history--even including war and genocide.

Like other human rights violations, poverty and climate change are
being caused by people who are fully aware of the consequences--and
they are doing it all the same. We, the well-fed people in rich countries, are those people. Some of us are
more guilty than others, of course.

Right now, a billion young lives are in danger.Poverty is reducing the life expectancy of children in
developing
countries, and climate change will reduce it even more. A billion
children who are alive today are likely to die early as an
indirect consequence of poverty and climate change. These a not crazy claims in someone's crazy blog. This really
is happening, and most researchers in the area of global
climate and global poverty would agree that it's true.
Moreover, we are causing it with our emissions, which can explain why most people seem to be ignoring it.

Humankind needs friends. A
friend is someone who listens when you have a problem, and doesn't
disappear when the going gets tough. On this page, I have tried to
present the main
problems facing the human species today. My
special request to readers of this page is to try to understand these
problems, even if you have different opinions or a different approach.
Then become a friend
of humanity, and help solve the problems.

That will also make you a friend
of the world's children.
Do you ever have to clean up after your children? Think of
this:
After we die, our children will have to clean up after us.
Right
now, we are in the process of making a much bigger mess than
they
can imagine. In fact, we cannot imagine it ourselves. Many of us
recognize this problem, but feel helpless to do
anything about it. We understand those signs in airplane washrooms that
say "As a courtesy to the next passenger, please use your paper towel
to wipe the basin", but we don't realise that the basin is the planet
and
the next passengers are our children. Most of us realise that the
airplane is part of the problem, but we are pretending not to know. We
are
looking the other way and pretending to be innocent.

A true friend not only
listens to our problems - s/he also celebrates our successes. Just
imagine, in our role as friends of the world's children, celebrating
the
end of poverty or the end of global warming. What a party that would be!

Putting people before principles

For humans, the
fundamental unit of value is the human life, and every human life has
the same value. This is my basic assumption. Basically, everything that I want to say boils down to this.

But many people in politics seem to place principles above people.

On the far left, there are those who aim to destroy
capitalism and replace it by communism. That capitalism is problematic
is obvious, but that does not necessarily mean that an ideal communist
society is better. In philosophy, a conclusion of this kind is called a
logical fallacy. But many on the far left refuse to accept that. For them, the communist
principle is all that counts. If a lot of people die in an armed
struggle to dispossess the rich, they reason, that's ok when you consider the
long-term benefits--as in the French and Russian revolutions. The abuse
of power in real communism can perhaps be solved using computer
technology, which perhaps can also enable a kind of anarchy, in which
hierarchical power structures can be avoided, leading to a new kind of
freedom.

On the extreme right, many favor a kind of return to the
law of the jungle, in which everyone has to look after him- or herself, and the strongest prevail over the weakest.
This is also portrayed as a kind of freedom. Some want no government
regulations at all, which perhaps makes them anarchists, too
(libertarianists, minarchists, anarcho-capitalists). The scientific
principle of "survival of the fitness" is misunderstood--people imagine
that when transferred to politics it will lead to higher quality of the
life for the few with the possible bonus of biological evolution toward
even higher goals, but always at the expense of the suffering masses.
Racism is a frequent element of such ideologies: the illusion that
races exist and one's own race is fundamentally superior (both also
contradicting scientific evidence), which seems to justify the
suffering of others--just as our hunger for meat seems to justify the
suffering of non-human animals.

These apparently contrary approaches have essential points in
common: a desire for freedom, anarchy, and utopia. The underlying
motivation may be an infantile, egoistic desire for perfection,
suggesting that
those who dream of such societies may not have grown up yet (and some
never do). "Maturity" is defined in different ways; I am thinking
of a mixture of realism,
modesty, responsibility, and genuinely caring about other people.
People who are "mature" in this
sense may fight for justice and honesty, but not for utopias.

Another thing uniting extreme left and right approaches is
over-simplification. Extremists believe naively in ideal solutions to inherently complex problems (nirvana fallacy)--something that humanities scholars traditionally accuse
scientists of. A century ago, scientifically (positivitist) oriented sociologists dreamed of
understanding society with quantititative models--analogous to the
mathematical models physicists use to understand the physical
universe. Their dream was not realized. Instead, they had to find ways of dealing with the inherent complexity of society.

Politics is equally complex. History has shown time and again
that the utopias promised by the extreme left and the extreme right are
practically impossible to achieve. That is true regardless of whether
they are desirable, which is a different question. Unfortunately,
people keep falling for utopic ideas. Perhaps it's human nature?

I want neither utopia nor revolution. All I am arguing for is some
basic honesty and
justice. When the far right call for "law and order", I agree with
them. The rich and especially the very rich should obey the law in
their countries and pay the right amount of tax, as determined by fair,
open democratic processes. Those who hide large amounts of money in tax
havens should be appropriately punished, remembering that tax havens
are one
of today's main causes of poverty. The same applies to those who
lie publicly about climate change, with devastating consequences
for the lives and livelihoods or millions or perhaps billions of
people in developing countries. With the enormous amounts of finance
that capitalism has generated, poverty should be eliminated, for
example by introducting an unconditional basic income. These goals can
be achieved without revolution if the biggest "white-collar criminals"
are brought to justice. The crimes that the far right complain about,
such as welfare abuse or the misdemeanors of asylum seekers, are
trivial by comparison.

The philosopher Emmanuel Kant argued that people should always be
treated as ends in themselves, and not (or not only) as means to ends.
Put more simply, people are always more important than principles.
Given the amount of suffering and injustice in the modern world, a
political principle that does not clearly serve the goal of reducing
the number of suffering people or the degree to which they are
suffering, both now in the future, it is not a good principle.

"Quantitative ethics" - what's that?

We often pretend that human lives are priceless, and wish that they
were; but in practice they have monetary value, and that can vary
enormously. Depending on your location and financial means, and talking
very round figures, your life may effectively be worth between a
thousand and a million dollars (consider the amounts invested in
life-saving treatments in different countries). In extreme cases, a
human life might be worth anything between one dollar and a billion
dollars. But we can also speak of the value of a human life without
referring to money at all. In that case, the value of two
human lives is twice that of one, and the value of a million lives is a million times that of one life
- regardless of financial means. That is another important assumption
behind these pages, and unfortunately it is not self-evident.

Like dollars and cents, values expressed in human lives can be added
and multiplied; they obey the laws of mathematics. But there is a
paradoxical difference: we want more money, but we don't want more
humans on the planet. Population growth is slowing, but the rate is
still far too high for a sustainable future (which is one reason why
education for girls in developing countries is so important). The
difference between lives and dollars, then, is that we can own money
but we should not love it, and we can love people but we should not own
them. If only this idea were implemented in international politics!

From a psychological viewpoint, we find it easier to empathize with the
suffering and fate of individuals and harder
to emotionally comprehend the fate of millions. To solve major global
problems,
we must do both. Globalisation has changed things:
increasingly, everything in the world depends on everything
else. We
can no longer reasonably separate our high standard of living in the
"west" from the low standard of living of others, especially if those
others are involved in trade relationships with us. We can no longer
ignore the plight of other people just because they are geographically
distant from us. Nor can we enjoy the fruits of the labor of past
generations while ignoring the fate of future generations.

It follows
from these ideas that responsible, self-respecting people - we who
got a good education
and enjoy a high quality of living - have a moral duty to help others
on a global basis and to develop a rational approach to this task.
Given that human lives represent our most important value, the most
important aspect of this duty is to prevent the lives of others from
being cut short by violence, preventable disease or curable disease, andassociated
suffering.
Resources applied to achieve that goal should be applied in a rational
way, based on estimates of the number of lives that can be saved for a
given amount of resources. For this purpose, mathematical risk
assessment theory, based on probability and order-of-magnitude
estimates, can be useful. Such resources should be applied independent
of
age, gender, skin color, disability, language, religion and so on. All
lives matter; it follows that black lives matter, female lives matter,
young lives matter and so on. These things may sound obvious, but
unfortunately people often do not practise what they preach. Beyond
that, we must help people everywhere achieve happiness and a reasonable
standard of living, and ensure sustainability, so that future
generations can enjoy the world that we enjoy today.

These points may sound like emotional appeals. Any discussion of
life-and-death issues is bound to be emotional, of course. There is
nothing wrong with emotion: in the end, it is what motivates change.
But it is also possible to be quasi-objective, and that is my primary
intention. I
challenge anyone to find errors in my logic, and on that basis to
present plausible alternatives.

The internal links to this page consider different
practical ways to achieve these goals in different areas. Many of my
arguments are not new. The amazing thing about them, and the reason I
am presenting them, is that they are not being implemented, as if
people did not understand obvious things.

The main threats and solutions

I am a human
rights activist, defending the rights of the bottom
billion: people living
in poverty in developing countries. Given the steadily increasing
wealth of the top billion, it is scandalous that many thousands still
die every day, and millions die every year, from hunger, preventable
disease, or curable disease (more).
This ongoing tragedy seldom hits
the headlines, but if you consider the total number of preventable
deaths per year or decade, poverty is killing far more people than
either
violence
(e.g. war and genocide) or natural disasters (e.g. storms and tsunamis)
(more).
Other things being equal, during this century alone global warming will
gradually increase the death toll by exacerbating food and water
shortages, causing hundreds of millions of deaths (more);
further hundreds of millions of climate refugees will die (more).
The 22nd century will be even worse (more),
even if greenhouse emissions completely stop in a few decades. These
predictions are based on mainstream climate science (more);
they are not exaggerated. This unprecedented emergency has largely been
created by multinational corporations for whom profit is more important
than people (more).

Solutions include:

tackling the causes of poverty, which include corruption
(tax havens, authoritarian government, exploitation of natural
resources by multinationals) and conflict (hawkish politics,
international arms trading);

raising official development assistance to the
globally agreed level of 0.7%
GDP;

taxing the burning of all fossil fuels by global agreement,
gradually
increasing the tax rate until global communities of climate scientists
agree the problem is under control, and spending the proceeds on
sustainable
energy (more);

aiming
for a new balance between competition and sharing (more)
and for economic sustainability and "green growth" rather than
traditional concepts of economic growth (more);

improving democratic systems, both globally and locally,
in both the public and the private sector (more
- more), and

prosecuting influential climate deniers for crimes
against humanity if they are causing millions of future deaths by
blocking solutions to global warming (more; more).

To make these things happen, we need worldwide peaceful protest (more).
The findings of leading climate scientists (more) suggest that we
must break out of this deadlock and implement radical solutions in the next few years. If
not, our grandchildren can expect a global catastrophe later this
century, and they will rightly blame us for having caused it. The
window of opportunity is gradually closing and there will be no second
chance.

My approach

My approach is not left- or right-wing, although many will consider it to be leftist. I agree with Mark Lynas when he wrote:

Solving the climate problem will involve big changes, to be sure; and
capitalism, as we have been experiencing it during the past few
neo-liberal decades, is by itself poorly suited to this task. In fact,
capitalism can be regarded as the cause of the problem. But in a
different context capitalism can become the motor that drives
solutions, just as it has been the motor for most human development in
the past few centuries. We need to reduce the wealth gap, which has
been steadily growing for decades, and strive to separate wealth and
corporations from politics - just as many countries have succeeded in
separating religion from politics (laïcité). A partial
separation of wealth and politics, and a return to the democratic
socialism of the 1970s, can be achieved by introducing new,
globally harmonized wealth, environment and transaction taxes, combined with universal, unconditional basic income
(and of course these are not the only options). In short, to solve the
climate problem, we must tame capitalism - not throw out the baby with
the bathwater.

A global political revolution is not necessary, and would probably
backfire. Revolutions typically cause enormous amounts of death and
suffering. If
humanity ever grows up, we will know that it has happened when a
problem of this magnitude is solved without violence. As the Beatles sang,
"But when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count
me out". What we need instead is for large numbers of people to
repeatedly and clearly state the obvious, refusing to be mislead by
denialist pseudo-scientific, pseudo-economic and pseudo-political
arguments and those with opposing vested interests.

Given this background, the aim of this page is not to entertain or impress. The aim is to identify the world's biggest problems
and consider how they could be solved. I will focus on matters of life
and death for millions of people that are being widely neglected,
or treated as if they did not exist (or as if those millions of people
did not exist). And I will advocate a simple approach to solving such
massive problems: tell the truth, simply and directly.
That is not as easy as it sounds, because to tell the truth you first
have to recognize it. In our everyday life, we are surrounded by distortions of the truth.
To recognize them as such, we need to train ourselves in the gentle art
of recognizing such distortions. That often involves understanding the
selfish motives that lie behind truth distortions, and noticing the
selfishness in ourselves that could lead us to believe such
distortions. To make progress, we must separate ourselves from cycles
of mutual deception, cut through the bullshit, and proclaim apparently
obvious things, simply and directly.

On my Wikipedia
page
in July 2014, I read that this website contains "various posts
on
radical green politics". That seems true, but it could also be
misleading. I am not primarily "green". The main aim of my posts
is to promote human rights; the environment (which includes animals,
plants and climate) is immeasurably valuable by itself, but I
consider human lives to be even more valuable. I am perhaps
"radically" interested in freedom, honesty, fairness, justice,
solidarity, and cultural diversity; but I am also opposed to all
extreme, fundamentalist, or utopian political ideologies. We
are
living in a sad and selfish world if it is considered "radical"
to try to tell the truth about global poverty and global warming, or to
try to develop practical strategies to defend the basic rights of a
billion people.

As
we peer into society's
future, we – you and I, and our government – must
avoid the
impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and
convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the
material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of
their political and spiritual heritage. (President Dwight D.
Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961)

Abstract. The
modern world's biggest problems from a human rights
perspective (which is the only morally defensible perspective) are
global poverty and global warming. To solve them, we need people with
wisdom, skills, courage, and an entrepreneurial spirit; people
who are dissatisfied with mediocrity, and actively reject it; people
who are prepared to lose old
friends and gain new friends to achieve their goals. The staggering
death rate caused by global poverty and (in the future)
global warming is regularly denied, actively or passively.
In both cases we are being dishonest and rejecting
responsibility,
as if we had not achieved moral maturity. We of the world's
"top billion" have the opportunity to solve the world's biggest
problems in the interest of everyone - but mainly in the interest of
the "bottom
billion", who are suffering and will suffer the most. Every individual
reading this text can tackle global
poverty and climate change by reducing (in-)direct burning of
carbon, participating in democratic processes, donating to appropriate
charities, contributing to research and public education, and so on.
That will be necessary as long as democratic systems are not motivating
politicians, and the capitalist system is
not motivating large corporations, to take the necessary action. The
background: Pre-industrial
temperatures were ideal for humans; we evolved in that complex
ecological context, and are adapted to it, as are the countless species
on whom we depend for our food and habitats. The main risk
from climate change is not slow human-made climate change,
which will be catastrophic, but faster natural climate change
triggered by human-made climate change ("positive feedback"), which
will
be even worse. The oceans are currently
slowing global warming, giving us a false sense of security. Global
warming will indirectly cause hundreds of millions of deaths later this
century, as death rates rise due to

poverty (hunger, curable disease,
preventable disease, violence), more frequent storms
and forest fires, longer
and more intense heat waves, longer droughts, melting glaciers,
expanding deserts, rising
seas, ocean acidification, loss of
biodiversity (species extinction), mass migration, and wars
over diminishing resources. Every single point in this list is
sufficient justification by itself for stopping most greenhouse-gas
production within a few years;
the combination of different factors and their interactions could bring
about human extinction. The problem can be solved without a
revolution. We must
urgently transfer subsidies from fossil fuels to sustainable
energy,
introduce new globally harmonized taxes on wealth, carbon, and
international transactions, meet existing agreements on official
development assistance, and end global tax evasion (tax havens). All of
that can happen within the current system. To do this will
require political will, honesty, courage, and global
cooperation. Holocaust comparisons are rightly taboo, but they may be
necessary to prevent a future Holocaust-like event in which untold
millions of people die as an indirect result of current global
economic and ecological trends, which are profoundly unfair and racist.
Like Germans in the 1930s, we are fully informed about what the
future might bring, and we have understood the message. Will we
actively prevent a future calamity or
remain passive and indifferent, allowing history to repeat itself? Will
we address or ignore fundamental ethical issues? Will we talk about
freedom, courage,
and responsibility, or remain silent? My statement is neither left- nor
right-wing; I
support democratically regulated capitalism. I am an
academic who is trying to formulate the truth on interesting
issues, based on many years of academic training and
experience. I
feel a moral obligation to make a positive contribution to the society
that has made my lifestyle and education possible, on behalf of future
generations.

A
vision for humanity

Humanity is making progress in some areas but not others. Technology
just keeps getting better, but catastrophic wars are still being waged
in many countries, and there are still millions of refugees trying to
move from poorer to richer countries. That makes you wonder what our
priorities are, or if we know how to spell words like "morality", let
alone know what they mean.

Above all, a billion people are still living in poverty, mainly
in
developing countries. The problem of poverty is the most serious of
all, because it causes the most deaths: millions every year from
hunger, curable disease and preventable disease (mainly children). The
rich nations could
have solved this problem in the past few decades if plans had been
developed and promises kept. What we should have done includes properly
financing official development aid, closing all tax havens, stopping
multinationals from stealing natural resources from developing
countries, taxing wealth, taxing international transactions, taxing
environmental damage. We
have not made much progress in these areas, apart from a regular stream
of
insufficient investment and good intentions. These include idealistic,
monumental projects such as the Millennium Development Goals, but the
truth behind
the glossy presentation on the UN websites is that the goals of such
projects will only be partially achieved. The main problem has always
been lack of funding.

We need to rise above this situation. Our vision should be to put an
end, slowly but surely, to the current global death toll from hunger,
preventable disease, and curable disease in
developing countries. Our vision should also be to radically and
rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global warming from
passing the 2°C mark, beyond which it may become uncontrollable
and
cause hundreds of millions or even billions of deaths in the future (more).
For all those who
want a better world in the long term, these two problems should surely
be at the top of the list.

Here we are, the top billion in the early 21st century. We probably
have the
highest standard of living of any living beings ever, past
and future.
From what we know about global warming and the limits of our natural
resources, it's not going to get any better than this. We might also
have reached the highest level of wisdom (intelligence and compassion)
in history. We
know of no other beings in the universe who could compete for these
honours, although we have tried very hard to find them. At the same
time we might be so stupid and greedy that we fail
to invest the small fraction of our wealth that is necessary to enlarge
this beautiful situation to include other people and future
generations.The appropriate response
to this unprecedented situation is not to laugh in embarrassment, or
hang our
heads in shame. The solution is to act.

What each of us can do

There are many options. Each of us can start by
picking one of them. Little things mean a lot.

Reduce
your personal footprint. Transport: Cut
down on
driving and flying. Use public transport more often, especially trams
and trains. Buy an
annual ticket for
all
public transport in your city. Get your bike out of the shed and ride
it to work. Sell your car or leave it at home. Move house so you can
easily commute by
public transport, bicycle or by foot. Housing.
Turn down the heating (wear a pullover instead) and avoid air
conditioning (wear light clothes instead). Reduce the temperature of
the hot water and use less of it when taking showers. Improve the
insulation. Install solar cells on the roof and have them connected to
the grid. Food.
Reduce
your methane
footprint by eating less red meat. Experiment with vegetarian or vegan food. Buy more local
produce. Shopping.
Stop
buying things you don't need. Don't
give up. Plan to sustainably reduce your personal
emissions every year for a decade.

Plant
trees. Support tree-planting
organisations and any politicians promoting tree
planting on a massive scale. Trees are the best known way to reduce CO2
levels, because unlike climate engineering solutions they
have other benefits and no side-effects.

Contribute
to public discourse. Write to
newspaper editors about global poverty and global warming - especially
during election campaigns. Join political Facebook groups and share
messages with friends.

Go
political. Vote for parties that
prioritise reduction of global poverty and global warming.
Encourage
others to do the same.

If you have been thinking about this for a long time (and
haven't we all?): snap out of it! You will feel better when you stop
procrastinating☺

Become a hero!

If you are a politician, sell yourself as reliable
and
compassionate. Talk about your country's commitment to 0.7% GDP for
official development assistance. Be proud of your country's
generosity.

If you are a student in science or
engineering, devote your life to the research and development
of sustainable
sources of energy. It's a growing
industry. Or you can do research in climate science, considering
questions not only of physics, chemistry and biology, but also of
sustainability, economics and ethics.

If you are working within or close to the fossil fuel
industry, apply for other jobs. You need the peace of mind, and the
movement to slow climate change needs your inside knowledge.

If you are a legal scholar, do research on protecting
the
rights of future generations by restricting the freedom of
speech
of influential climate deniers or preventing the exploitation of
new fossil fuel reserves.

If you are policy maker a few years from retirement,
"come out" on climate. You will lose some friends but win
more. As the climate crisis deepens, your circle of support will
broaden.

Jump over your own shadow! Years after your decision, you will be
amazed that you were once too afraid.

Everything you always wanted to
know about climate change (but were afraid to ask)

The implications of climate change are pretty horrific, so it would be
understandable if you were "afraid to ask". Many people don't
have
the courage to read texts like this, it seems. Congratulations for
getting this far!

The most reliable source of information on climate change is the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC is a global
affiliation of leading climate scientists whose mandate is purely
scientific, namely to understand global climate and inform the world of
future developments. They are not biased toward exaggerating the threat
of climate change, as climate deniers have claimed; in fact, one could
equally argue that their predictions are on the conservative side.
There are many reputable, readable, informative accounts
of climate change and its impact on future generations in the
scientific literature; an example from chemistry is Williams
and Crutzen (2013) and from physics is Hansen
and others (2013).

The IPCC does not say the following, because it is obvious: We are all
burning fossil fuels, directly or indirectly, every day. Our carbon
footprint is too big.
If every person on the planet burned the same amount of carbon as we in
the middle and upper classes are burning now, and if they had been
doing so for the past several decades, the devastating scenes in Al
Gore’s “An
inconvenient truth” would already be upon us.

The IPCC has instead issued the following warning. If we are to achieve the goal of
limiting global
warming to 2°C, the annual growth in global emissions must stop
by
2020. After that, global emissions must decrease steadily, approaching
zero in 2070. Like
most statements in the IPCC report and its convenient summary, this is
the product of an extended process of negotiation among the
world’s leading climate scientists. It is almost certainly
true.
From a practical viewpoint, it is the report's most important
statement.

Stopping the global growth in emissions by 2020 will be very
difficult. It is perhaps the greatest challenge the human species ever
faced, and most people are basically ignoring it. The UN
climate talks in 2015 are widely regarded as humanity's last
chance to get global warrming under control. Facing that challenge
head-on is what this page is about.

There are several reasons why most people are ignoring this challenge.
One is denial:
many people are either explicitly contradicting IPCC predictions
(active denial) or quietly proceeding as if they are not true (passive
denial). A second is fear:
many people understand what is happening, but are afraid to face up to
it. That's the "heads in the sand" response. A third is misunderstanding: Many people don't have a feel for the basic physics, which is
understandable. Many never studied physics, not even at school; and
reports about climate change in the media are often confusing or
deliberately distorted. Having studied and taught physics at
universities myself, I feel an obligation to find clear ways of
explaining these things. In the following paragraphs, I will
focus
on three central points that are often misunderstood: why global
warming is dangerous, different kinds of
global warming, and the role of the oceans.

1. The
pre-industrial global mean temperature was ideal for humans.

The current global mean temperature (measured at the sea level in the
shade and averaged over time and area) is about 15 Celsius. I say
"about"
because there are different methods of calculating it that come to
different conclusions. But regardless of the method, the global mean
temperature is almost one degree higher than it was a century ago. It
is expected to rise another 1-3 degrees during this century, i.e. 2-4 degrees altogether, depending
on how well we respond to the challenge of global warming. The
temperature will continue to rise in the 22nd, even if all emissions
stopped now.

Many people think that a few degrees is not much, so changing the
earth's average temperature by a few degrees should not be a big deal.
The reason why it is such a big deal is the effect on our
ecology
- that complex system within which plants and animals
interact,
and within which our species evolved. The ecology is where our food and
water comes from. If our food and water supplies are threatened, you
can guess what will happen next.

That may seem obvious, but deniers have another argument up their
sleeves. This is only a transition, they say. When the earth
reaches a new temperature and stabilizes, things will be ok again. This
is incorrect for two reasons. First, the process of warming
is expected to continue for centuries. We cannot realistically talk
about stabilization unless greenhouse gases are drastically reduced in
the coming years. Even then it will take generations before things
start to stabilize. Second, humans evolved within a complex global
ecosystem that was tuned to a certain global average temperature. If
you change that temperature, you change the entire ecosystem, which
means you also change human beings.

The temperature of the earth's surface has changed constantly in
geological history, for various natural reasons. For most of that time,
humans were not around. The ideal global mean temperature for humans
and other currently existing species is the global mean temperature
when we were evolving, which was during the past few million years.
During that time, the environment with which humans interacted also
evolved.

What happens when you change that temperature? The word "adaptation"
sounds innocent, but if we are talking about biological evolution, we
are generally talking about large numbers of premature deaths. That's
how
evolution happens: some live and some die. Those organisms that manage
to reproduce and survive better in a given environment are the ones
that pass their genes to future generations. In the case of
humans, we might be talking about billions of deaths
over a period of centuries before humanity as a whole can adapt
physiologically to a
significant change in global mean temperature. That's how brutal
evolution is. But even that might be insufficient for "human evolution"
to happen in this case. Biologically, humankind has barely
evolved in the
past hundred thousand years or so. The most important changes have been
superficial responses to differences in climate: the facial
and bodily features and skin colors that enable us to guess whether
someone comes from
Asia, Africa or Europe. These changes, which ultimately don't make much
difference to the ability of modern humans (with their houses, heaters
and air conditioners) to live in different climates, were only possible
because human communities were separated from each other by large
distances, and mobility was limited, for many thousands of years. That
is unlikely to happen again. Besides, right now we are quite concerned
about the next hundred years.

The emergence of life on earth was a coincidence with a tiny
probability. Life only exists because the climate changed in a certain
temporal sequence, more or less by accident. If the long and complex
series of climate changes on this planet had been just a
little
different in the past 4.5 billion years, we would not be here to talk
about it. In fact, there may have been no life at all. Even after life
emerged and flourished, the probability that a species like humans
would emerge was tiny. So the probability that we exist is one tiny
number multiplied by another. It's impossibly tiny. If the earth's mean
temperature had been a few degrees warmer or cooler during its more
recent history (the past few million years), we would not be here, or
if we were here we would not be here in such enormous numbers,
totally dominating all other life forms and changing the climate.

It follows from this argument that the ideal global mean temperature
from a human viewpoint is the temperature that we had before
industrialisation, because it enabled us to emerge and flourish. If we
would like to continue flourish, we should ensure that the earth's
climate does not depart too far from pre-industrial climate.

2. There are two
different kinds of global warming: slow human-made and fast natural.

The
words "slow" and "fast" are relative and very approximate; a "slow"
warming process might take a century, whereas a "fast" process might
take a decade. To add to the confusion, some climate scientists use the
word "slow" to apply to certain natural positive feedback processes,
which I here call "fast" because they are faster than human-made
("anthropogenic") warming.
When I say "slow" I am referring to the fact that human-made warming
has
been going on for over a century, which for most of us seems like a
long time.

If we now distinguish between (mainly) human-made
and (mainly) natural warming, we can better understand what is going
on. In particular we can immediately see what is wrong with many of the
tricky arguments of those devilish climate deniers.

The first kind of warming, "slow human-made", happens when we
increase the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by
burning fuel (producing CO2), destroying forests (which would otherwise
have absorbed CO2), or raising cattle (producing methane or CH4). This
process has been going on for well over a century, but we are only now
starting to notice the climatic effects. The winter
is still cold, rainfall does not seem to have changed, and the sea does
not seem to be rising. We read about climate change, but cannot yet
perceive
it with our own eyes.

"Fast natural" warming is a collection of different processes that will
be triggered by slow human-made warming when the temperature
crosses certain thresholds, according to the theories and models
of climate
scientists. In the distant past, fast natural warming was triggered by
natural events such as changes in the earth's orbit around the sun, so
we can find out about it from studying the earth's geological history.
Fast natural warming involves natural
feedback processes,
such as the earth absorbing more energy from sunlight when the artic
ice is no longer there to reflect it; stored methane being released
from melting ice or frozen peat bogs; or the drying of rainforests,
leading to fires that add even more CO2 to the atmosphere. If these
processes enhance warming, they are called "positive feedback". There
are
also negative feedback processes which reduce global
warming, e.g.
a warming earth radiates more
heat; but the effect of positive
feedback processes is generally predicted to be stronger. Positive
feedback processes will accelerate global warming, hence the adjective
"fast".

The predictions of
the IPCC are mainly about slow human-made warming, because it
can more easily be measured and modeled. There is more uncertainty
surrounding fast natural warming - but as the words "fast" and
"natural" imply, it represents even greater
risks. When a major natural feedback process gets underway, the effects
will
probably be catastrophic and irreversible. The good old days of a benign global
climate for humans will be lost forever. Such long-term processes
happened
millions of years ago, causing large temperature changes that lasted
for tens of thousands of years (more).

3. The oceans are
slowing down human-made global warming.

To understand this point we need first to separate the main cause of global
warming from its main effect.
The cause
of slow human-made warming is the greenhouse gases that we are
busy pumping into the atmosphere; the effect
is the resultant rise
in mean atmospheric temperature.

In slow human-made warming, there
is an enormous time lag between cause and effect. The main
reason is the heat capacity of the oceans. Oceans cover 72% of
the
earth's surface, and
their average depth is 3.7 km. That is an enormous amount of water. How
much energy does it take to heat water? Imagine a large spaghetti pot.
It takes a long time to bring it to the boil before putting in the
spaghetti. Multiply that by zillions, and you have our oceans. It will
take decades for the temperature of the oceans to rise by 1°C,
even
if the atmosphere above the oceans has already risen by several
degrees.

The oceans are giving us a false sense of security
and innocence. They are preventing the temperature of the atmosphere
from changing, in spite of enormous increases in greenhouse gas
concentrations. They are also absorbing some of the greenhouse gases.
Today, the oceans seem like our friend; but they will be the enemy of
future generations, for several reasons:

Increases in the average temperature of the
oceans will be very slow, but also practically irreversible.
Once
the temperature rise becomes noticeable, we will be powerless to do
anything about it. So far the oceans are "only" about 0.1°
warmer.

When ocean temperatures change, ocean currents will
also
change. Ocean currents have a big effect on climate;
for example Europe would be much colder if not for the Gulf Stream.
Changing ocean currents will drastically affect
regional climates.

Ocean
acidification due to CO2 absorbtion will have serious effects on marine
life, including fish supplies. So far the pH has "only" changed by 0.1,
but there are already measurable effects. Acidification will also
affect phytoplankton, which produces more than half of the
Earth’s oxygen (more).
You are breathing it.

Warming oceans may become a
major source of natural methane, causing further warming. Moreover, the
CO2 that is currently being absorbed by oceans will be
released again when they get warmer, accelerating global warming. Both
of these are forms of "positive feedback", or "fast natural"
warming.

Sea
level will rise for two reasons: melting ice on land
(glaciers, Greenland, Antarctic), and expansion of water as it
warms. We are talking about up to one meter by 2100 and further metres
in later centuries. That will displace hundreds of millions of
people. If all the ice melted, sea level could rise by 70 metres.

Once these changes become serious (what we have seen so far is
relatively minor), silly old "homo sapiens" - the
species that is currently jumping at the opportunity to drill for oil
in the Arctic now that global warming is melting the ice, while at the
same time denying that global warming is happening - will finally start
to panic. But it will be too late. In fact, it is almost too late now.
We will try to solve the problem by trying to stop greenhouse
gas production altogether by legal, economic or even military means.
The military option is really scary and no-one is talking about it, but
it is obviously possible. We will then try to get the greenhouse gases
back out of the atmosphere using climate
engineering
(geoengineering). Research on this topic is very important and should
have a much higher profile and much more funding. But with the best
will in the world it is unlikely to solve the problem
- not
even partially. The main problem is the sheer
amount of
CO2 and other greenhouse gases. By the
time global
warming reaches 2°C - the threshold the international community
has agreed not to cross - humans will have burned a
trillion (1012) tons of carbon, producing some 4
trillion tons of CO2. At
the moment no-one has a feasible plan for getting even a
significant fraction of that CO2
out of the atmosphere again, let alone all of it. Feel
free to pray for a miracle. Moreover, the side-effects of
geoengineering solutions may be worse than the problem they are
supposed to solve. The safest and most effective option is to plant
billions of trees - a solution that every country should be
urgently pursuing.

In summary, there is a good reason why the human response to slow
human-made climate change has been so inadequate - so far at least.
The scientists are telling us about climate change, but we cannot see
it happening.
That is because the time between cause and effect is so long. That in
turn is because of the oceans. The average temperature of the oceans
can only change very slowly.

Even if all emissions stopped now, global mean temperature would
increase for at least a century. Possibly much longer, depending on how
long plants take to convert the carbon dioxide back to carbohydrates by
photosynthesis. Every extra ton of carbon that is burned is
exacerbating the problem and increasing the probability and/or
magnitude of future catastrophe. We must therefore aim for zero
global emissions as soon as possible. Just reducing emissions
by 10%, 20% or 50% is not enough.

On this basis, I have a special proposal for the binomial nomenclature
of our genus and species. We really should change the name of our
species to homo stupidus.
That is a bit of a joke, and besides it not a new idea. The following
is neither an old idea nor a joke: Given that we are consciously
destroying the world for our children and grandchildren, a better name
might perhaps be homo
stupidus crudelis. What could be more stupid and
cruel than consciously
causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people?

How many lives will global
warming cost?

You can find a lot of information about the effect of global warming on
sea level, storms, glaciers, water supplies, species extinction, loss
of biodiversity, ocean acidification, and so on. But you will find
precious little about the main cost of global warming, which is
measured in human lives. If you believe in human rights, human lives
are the most valuable thing we have, and every life has equal value. It
follows that the main consequence of global warming is the number of
deaths that it will cause.

If you put "climate death" into google, the information that you find
can be misleading. Some people are assuming that deaths due to
climate change will be caused primarily by longer,
hotter heat waves.
It is true that the death rate from heat waves in the hottest countries
may skyrocket in the future, because beyond a certain combination of
temperature and humidity (wet bulb temperature)
the human body is no longer capable of maintaining its normal
temperature. Only those with air conditioning or water for swimming
will survive. But this horrifying scenario will not be the main cause
of death.

Every year, some ten million people die in developing countries for
reasons associated with poverty. The most important such reasons fall
into three categories: hunger, curable disease and preventable disease.
The main effect of global warming will be to cause this figure to rise,
if other factors remain the same. At the moment, this figure is
gradually falling for various reasons such as development projects
including the Millenium Developmental Goals; we can also hope that
global markets will become better
regulated and global competition will become freer and more fair. At
the same time, this figure is gradually increasing due to global
warming. The total, measurable death rate is a sum of partial death
rates, each of which is associated with a different cause of death.
Over the course of this century, global warming will gradually become
the main cause of premature death developing countries. For example,
according to UNICEF the number of people suffering from lack of clean
drinking water, today 800 million, could increase to 2 billion by 2100.
Today, 1400 children die every day from diarrhoea; the main causes are
dirty drinking water, lack of toilets and poor hygiene.

The following figure is a scenario for the
development of the poverty-related death rate during the 21st century.
Consider the two straight lines that look like an open jaw. The lower
line assumes that, in the absence of global warming, the current
death rate will gradually fall. This is a rather
optimistic assessment based on current trends. The upper line
is based on the IPCC prediction that global mean temperatures
will
probably
rise by about 3°C during the 21st century if the human species
responds moderately, but insufficiently, to the warnings of scientists.
The way things are going, this is what really will happen. At some
point, the negative effects of climate change will overtake the
positive effects of developmental assistance and fairer
participation of developing countries in free markets. The net death
rate from poverty-related causes will increase as food
supplies and health are increasingly affected by changing
weather patterns (droughts, floods), loss of biodiversity, reduction
and contamination of fresh water supplies, more violent or frequent
storms, and rising populations - and unpredictable interactions between
these developments. The violet area between the
two lines is the total number of deaths that will be attributable to
climate change during
the 21st century. It corresponds to hundreds of millions of deaths. We
are causing
these future deaths now
with our carbon and methane emissions, deforestation and so on.

Before
continuing, I
want to emphasize that this diagram is just a sketch. All values in it
are very rough estimates. Even the year "2000" is
intended to mean "roughly the start of the 21st century" and could be
plus or
minus 20. Basically, the graph says only three things. First, the rate
of preventable deaths in developing countries is currently roughly 10
million per year. Second, in the absence of climate change this number
will gradually fall, mainly due to constructive collaboration between
rich and poor countries, funded by official developmental assistance.
Third, climate change will probably cause this number to rise
instead. The lines are not necessarily straight; in fact, the upper
line
should be curved, because the effect of climate change is expected to
increase exponentially and not linearly. Even with all this
uncertainty, the very real prospects of this sketch becoming reality
are surely nothing less than terrifying. We are talking about causing
hundreds of millions of deaths with our greenhouse gas emissions. Even
if the climate deniers were right and this will only happen with a
small probability, say 10%, we are still effectively talking about tens
of millions of preventable deaths. Conversely, if the IPCC is
underestimating the scale of the problem (for example by neglecting
interactions between different factors, or by not being not
interdisciplinary enough) then we might be talking about a billion
preventable deaths.

The
graph does not
include other major causes of death. These include death as a result of
increased frequency and intensity of storms, conflicts over diminishing
resources, mass migration of climate refugees, and quite possibly the
mass slaughter of millions of climate refugees as they try to invade
the richer countries. The richer countries might find themselves in a
situation where mass slaughter on the borders seems inevitable, because
they do not have enough food and water for their existing populations -
let alone millions of additional climate refugees. Disrespect for human
rights is already the norm rather than the exception on the borders of
rich countries.

Even
that is not all. The 22nd century might be even worse, given
that according to the IPCC
"most aspects of climate change will persist
for many centuries even if emissions of CO2 are stopped". To understand
why this is so, please reread the previous
section.

Of
course any
estimate of the number of deaths caused by global warming will be very
approximate. But the sources of evidence that I have considered, when
you consider them together, suggest that this number will be roughly
one billion. It will certainly be more than one hundred million, and it
will certainly be less than ten billion - the projected world
population in 2100. In other words, global warming will gradually kill
about 10% of the global population - that is, the population that we
expect to reach in 2100 without global warming. Given the possibility
of "runaway climate change" after crossing "tipping points", this could
be a conservative estimate. It is certainly not exaggerated.

The central role of taxation

Solving these problems will cost a lot of money, and a lot of this
money will come from taxes. The money will not be somehow magically
created by the marketplace; that is the kind of thinking that led to
the 2007-08 global financial crisis. We will have to calculate the
costs and pay the bill. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

People like to complain about taxes. Everyone is paying too much, it
seems. And to be sure every government in the world is wasting some of
its taxation income. Minimizing wastage is a constant challenge in any
large organization, public or private.

But without tax we would have no
national states, no schools, no welfare net. We would have no
infrastructure: no roads, no airports, no water supply, no sewerage, no
electricity grid, no public transport. These are the foundations upon
which private companies build their fortunes. Famous entrepreneurs like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs would never
have made it if not for those countless people who preceded them and
built the infrastructure they that needed to realise their ideas. Previous
generations had given them electricity, banks, cars, education for the
people who worked for them, their own education, ready access to good food
and clean water, and so on. Without tax, they would
not have these things that we all take for granted. Without those
things we would essentially have no free market, no capitalism and no
prosperity. That's how important taxation is.

I am one of the lucky ones. I have a permanent job until I retire. I
belong to what might be quaintly described as the upper middle class. I
don’t have much capital to speak of, but I could easily pay
more
income tax to help governments to solve this problem. If you agree with me that this is possible, we could lobby governments to
increase taxes on those that can bear it for this purpose. Most of us
are already giving some money to charity, and perhaps we are also
getting tax deductions for our gifts. If that is the case, this idea is
nothing new, and surely not terribly shocking. The money has to come
from somewhere.

We all have a part to play. Taxes are levied according the
basic principle that those who can, pay; the more you have, the more
you are able to pay, which means the more you should pay. The gap
between rich and poor has been going up steadily in the past few
decades due to globalization: better-off people have been able to make
their fortunes (some small, some large) on increasingly open and
technologized global markets, while low and middle earners have mainly
remained
dependent on employers (if they're lucky), welfare and charity for
income.
National states have similarly remained dependent on national sources
(taxes) for their income, which is one of the reasons for their rising
debts.

There are now well over a thousand billionaires in the
world, and their number is increasing rapidly. On the face of it,
there's nothing wrong
with being rich - if you're sitting in a comfortable chair,
reading this on your lap-top computer, and sipping the perfect
cappuccino, then you know the benefit of
being at least relatively rich. But it's not quite that simple. First,
the richer you are, the bigger your carbon footprint; as I will explain
below, that translates into the deaths of future people. Second, there
is a limited amount of money and
resources in the world, which means the more the rich have, the less
the poor have. In recent decades, the rich and middle classes have been
getting richer, but poverty has essentially stagnated, and about ten
million poor people per year are dying of poverty-rated causes. That is
pretty hard to justify. Third, the richer you are,
the more likely you are to have developed strategies to reduce
your tax bill: you will be able to afford an accountant who knows your
regional and federal tax laws inside out, including their loopholes. If
you are very rich, you can probably afford an even better accountant
with a lot of experience playing elaborate
tricks that save
enormous amounts of tax. We all like to reduce our tax, but
it is generally accepted that the richer we are, the better we are at
tax avoidance.

To solve the problem of tax evasion and avoidance, we need to simplify
taxation laws to make them more transparent and reduce the incidence of
loopholes (more). We also
need to globally harmonize
taxes so that it is no longer possible to evade them by capital flight
(moving from one country to another; more).
The taxes in question might
include wealth, transaction and environmental taxes. Another promising
idea is a global agreement to tax the value of all companies (based on
their capitalised values) listed on all stock exchanges, all at the
same flat rate. A kind of wealth tax for companies. Since the value of
all companies on all stock exchanges is publicly declared, it would be
easy to implement such a tax. The tax would be transparent and fair,
and evasion would be impossible. Competition would be unaffected, since
all companies would be treated equally. Why are simple ideas like that
not being implemented?

So here is the so-called $60,000 question: If you live in a nice house,
have a nice job and eat nice food (a
member of the middle
class?), would you be prepared to lobby your government to push for tax
increases to cover projects to reduce global poverty and global
warming? If you are rich, or even just relatively rich (a
member of the upper class?), would you be prepared to pay additional
taxes on wealth, transactions and the environment for the good
of humanity, provided those taxes
were administered fairly on a global scale and all taxpayers were
treated equally? If your answer is yes, we can join forces to make
these ideas a reality. It's just a matter of doing it, really.

The practical facts

Many people are skeptical about such proposals. They point to
unresolved problems and stir up emotional debates. Sometimes the
debates go on for a long time, and the matter is still not resolved.
These debates divert out attention from the main issues.

It doesn’t have to be like this. The situation is complex,
but
there are also two simple facts that we should not forget. These are
the facts about what we could do to resolve the situation, if we want
to. They are practically oriented facts.

1. The rich
countries could completely eliminate global poverty, if they wanted to.

That is a surprising statement and the most people immediately reject
it. We have always known poverty, we have always wanted to eliminate
it, and we never came anywhere near succeeding. But the problem is
essentially rather simple. In his book "The End of Poverty", economist
Jeffrey Sachs explained how we could gradually eliminate global poverty
by boosting budgets for
official
development assistance to the globally agreed level of 0.7% of GDP and
staying there 20 years. Of course no-one can reliably predict in
advance whether or when such a plan would
succeed. Economic predictions are always uncertain. But it certainly is
a fact that the more money you give to a
country, the richer it becomes; and the more money you give to
international developmental projects to develop complex
infrastructures in poor countries - the tried-and-tested kind upon
which the prosperity of rich countries is based, such as fresh water
supplies, electricity, schools, medical services, agricultural
technology and know-how - the more likely it is
that poverty in these countries will be eliminated. The
probability
of success is even greater if every step of the way is the result of a
close collaboration between leading representatives of the country in
question, leading international researchers in the area of each
project, and representatives of the rich donor countries. This
collaborative process will obviously work if it is adequately funded,
and it is on this level that one may reasonable talk about a "fact".

Why, then, do so many people doubt this, and instead emphasize the
difficulties? Then shake their head in disappointment and sigh, saying
"It will never work"? The experience of climate denial has
taught
us to look for financial motives behind public opinion, especially when
the general public is evidently confused about an important
issue. In this case, the ultimate reason for doubt is
probably a
lack of willingness
to provide the necessary finance. People are simply not prepared to be
that generous. So far, it has not been possible to convince the global
community to provide the necessary finance. At
the moment, many countries are paying around
one half of the agreed amount, and some are paying much less; only a
handful (e.g. Sweden) are achieving the globally agreed goal of 0.7%
GNP.

But you don’t have to know any of this detail to believe the
simple claim that poverty can be eliminated by adequately financing
existing aid projects.
Existing projects are obviously already very sophisticated. The main
actors in the global aid community have learned from decades of
experience how best to spend development dollars, of which there are
never enough. Of course mistakes are being made all the time, but the
same applies to any large business. The difference between global aid
projects and regular businesses is that people who work in this area
are mainly motivated by altruism. If that is true, it is surely obvious
that increasing the aid budget will eventually allow all
developing countries to
cross the line between dependence and independence, as Sachs argued in
his book - the line where total income finally starts to exceed total
expenditure. In an ostensibly free global market and without sufficient
aid, developing
countries can only achieve this goal if they
have exceptionally good luck – for example, if they discover
a
new natural resource (hopefully not oil, coal or gas) that they can
sell (assuming
that the profits go to their own people and not to some
multinational corporation). Without such luck, developing countries are
looking at
a future of chronic poverty. This is true even if the rich countries
drop all of their protectionist barriers.

In general economic terms,
we can say that institutionalized redistribution is a necessary
ingredient of
sustainable capitalism. Every modern national economy has
institutionalized redistribution: if you are unemployed, disabled or a
single parent, the government gives you an amount of money that is
comparable with the poverty line. Without institutionalized
redistribution, the whole system would collapse. This is true of
national economies, and it is also true of the global economy.

2. The rich
countries could bring global warming under control, if they wanted to.

People are more likely to accept this statement than the previous one.
Perhaps they should not be. Given the vast amount of greenhouse gas
that we have already produced, and the current atmospheric
concentrations which are much higher than at any previous time during
the evolution of our species - let alone the complexity of the global
political and economic situation surrounding climate change - this
second point might be even harder to achieve than the first. Still,
given the enormous wealth of the wealthiest humans on the planet (by
now there must be close to 2000 billionaires), it is certainly a fact
that we could solve the climate problem if the rich realised how urgent
the situation is and decided together to throw an unprecedented amount
of money at it.

We don't have to wait for the rich to do that. Global warming could be
brought under control by a combination of several well-known
strategies.
These
include transferring investment in fossil fuels to sustainable energy,
taxing the burning of all fossil fuels, spending the proceeds on
subsidies for sustainable energy and reforestation, long-term promotion
of public transport and at the expense of private transport in cities,
collaborating with developing countries to develop their sources of
sustainable energy, and so on. Kevin Anderson, professor of
Energy
and Climate Change at the University of Manchester, has argued that
economic "de-growth" is necessary to fight global warming (more).
These things are largely possible even
without enormous new financial input. Evidently, we have to stop
talking about these
things and do them. Most
of all, national states must simply create and respect international
agreements on emissions that are consistent with the findings of the
IPCC.

In summary, the above two points are clearly true, but many people are
going to great
lengths to thwart them with complex, sophisticated sounding
arguments. The main reason for the denial is financial:
solving
these problems
will cost a lot of money. A large part of that money is under the our
control - yes us, the rich .....and the relatively rich (the middle
class?). Both groups are basically refusing to pay the bill to stop
global poverty and global warming. We are regarding our money as more
important than the well-being and quality of life of our grandchildren
and future generations in developing countries. We are acting as if
money was more important than human lives.

The challenge of global
cooperation

Progress toward an end of poverty and toward managing global warming
will only happen if the nations of the world cooperate. What if some
refuse? All that good work on the part of the cooperative, generous
countries could be wasted. So what’s the point of even
trying?
The EU is supposed to be leading the world in climate management but
even they are saying they "can't afford it" (more).
It's a familiar theme: money is supposed to be more important than
untold millions of human lives and the future of our children.

A
classic case of non-cooperation was the the failure of the USA (and
Australia) to sign the
Kyoto accord in 2001. That was a giant setback. Kyoto had a lot of
other problems, too. But for all its deficiencies,
it was not a waste of time. Quite the contrary, it was perhaps the
greatest expression so far of global determination to get global
warming under control. It was also a gigantic wake-up call for the
people of the USA (and many other countries) to start taking the issue
of climate seriously. After
a decade of national debate inspired by the Kyoto fiasco, the USA is
now aligning itself with other countries on climate (unfortunately the
same cannot be said for Australia in early 2014, but the
people
are increasingly fed up with their climate-denying government). There
have even
been bilateral talks between USA and China.

The moral to the story is: we have to expect setbacks. They are part
of the deal. They can happen repeatedly, and they can be quite serious.
But giving up is not a reasonable or rational response. Experience
shows that every positive action in the global community has a
resonance that leads, somewhere, sometime, to more positive action. You
can’t run a business like this, of course. But that is
not
what we are trying to do. Instead, we are trying to ensure the
long-term survival of the capitalist system within which businesses can
be run, so that our grandchildren will have the same opportunity that
we had to run businesses.

An important question is whether developing countries should be allowed
to increase their emissions at a faster rate than developed countries,
because they need to do that to get out of poverty. When the question
is phrased like this, the answer is obviously yes - but this answer is
also misleading. The sad truth is that industrialised countries have
been killing future generations for decades with their emissions. In
this situation, every extra ton of greenhouse gas is a ton too many.
The emissions basically have to stop, regardless of where they are
coming from. Industrialised countries are hardly being kind or generous
if they allow developing countries to make a "fair contribution" to
this indirect killing spree. The only morally acceptable solution is to
try to prevent the development or expansion of any new fossil fuel
sources or industries anywhere, and at the same time to invest in
research and development on diverse alternatives everywhere. When
developing countries accuse the rich countries of being unfair, they
are generally right, but the solution is not to encourage them to be as
bad as the rich countries so we can all go down together (or more
precisely: so our children and grandchildren can all go down together).
The solution is to increase official development assistance to the
internationally agreed rate of 0.7% GDP and stop being so miserly with
our enormous wealth. The solution is to get rid of the many obstacles
to truly fair trade and a just global system of taxation.

Has this happened before?

Global warming is unprecedented, but human beings have faced other
massive problems in the past. Sometimes they solved the problem, and
sometimes they made it worse. Can you think of a past situation in
which countless people said the following to themselves? If
everyone else is doing it, then I will do it too. It cannot be wrong,
and I
cannot be guilty. This
statement sounds reasonable, but it may be logically false. It is
indeed possible for everyone to be doing the wrong thing, all at the
same time.

In Stanley Milgram's famous psychological experiment
in
the 1960s, experimental participants thought they were giving
electric shocks to other participants, who were obviously suffering and
may even be dying or dead. The experimenter gave increasingly
authoritarian instructions that they must continue giving the shocks at
increasing voltages, and most did. This horrifying finding is hardly
applicable to global warming, because no-one is ordering us to burn
fossil fuels. We are doing it voluntarily. Moreover, most of us are
unaware that the burning of fossil fuels is killing millions of future
people.

According to the 2012
DARA report,
carbon burning is already killing millions of people every year, mainly
due to indoor smoke and air pollution. In addition to this, in coming
decades climate change will increase the
preventable death rate in developing countries by indirectly affecting
supplies of food and drinking water - again by millions per year.
Almost
no-one is talking about these problems. Those who realise what is going
on are suppressing the thought. It's like a
dreadful secret - a "whispering in our hearts", comparable for example
with modern Australians' suppressed feelings of guilt about Aboriginal
genocide. Incidentally, Australians complain today
that Turkey is suppressing the truth about the Armenian
genocide,
and after the second world war many Germans and others claimed not to
have known that people were being killed in concentration camps.

Milgram's experiment was an attempt to understand the Holocaust. Why
would normal people obey orders to kill other people, in extreme
conflict
with their conscience? Milgram's experiment deliberately isolated
one aspect of the problem, namely obedience to authority. It ignored
the
role of racism, and it ignored the ample time the Nazis had to reflect
about what they were doing. Millions of well-meaning Germans,
and millions of citizens of other
European countries that became part of Germany or were taken over by
Germany during the second world war, contributed voluntarily
to a giant,
complex social machine that eventually led to the murder of six
million people. They were motivated by a combination of racism,
conformism and fear. Many were supporting the Nazi project simply
because most other people were doing the same thing. They thought: If
everyone else is doing it, then I will do it too. It cannot be wrong,
and I
cannot be guilty. They
had two further excuses that we do not have today: they were
obeying laws that were created by the Nazis to achieve their
evil
goals, and their freedom of speech was severely restricted.

What will happen
after global warming? How will the survivors feel about it in a few
centuries from now?

Comparisons with the Holocaust are taboo, and for good reason. The
Holocaust was without doubt the most serious crime ever committed.
Nothing else in history can be compared with it. Even the Atlantic
slave trade in the 16th-19th centuries is not comparable, even though
it was also motivated by racism and led to enormous suffering and the
death of millions of people. The reason is that the slave traders did
not, on the whole, intend to kill the slaves. The Holocaust is unique
because it truly involved mass murder on an unprecedented scale. I am
making this point because many evidently still do not understand
it. I was one of them, for which I apologize.

After 1945, the
international community cried “Never again!” in
unison, and
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was born – probably
the
most important document ever written. The very expression
“Never again!” implies that something similar to
the
Holocaust is possible in the future. In order to prevent another
Holocaust, we must
compare possible future
events with the Holocaust. The intention is primarily to prevent
genocide, and in that regard we have not been successful, as
the
many cases of genocide considered by the International Criminal Court
testify - the worst being Rwanda.

Global warming is fundamentally incomparable with the Holocaust,
because it does not involve murder. However, global warming could cause
the deaths of 10, 100 or even 1000 times more people. Given the
possibility of runaway climate change driven by positive feedback
processes, the probability that global warming kills most of the human
species is definitely greater than zero; if there is such a thing as a
"rational wild" guess, I would place that probability at 10%, by which
I mean certainly more than 1% and certainly less than 100%. That is a
reasonable estimate considering three things: the relevant
science, the way global politics are going, and the uncertainty in both
areas (especially the latter).

What else can we learn from the Holocaust when trying to prevent
catastrophic global warming? In
both cases, millions of people know (knew) or guess (guessed) what is
(was) going on, but kept contributing to the problem all the
same. Today, that is you and me.
Ordinary people are failing (failed) to change their behavior and are
pretending (pretended) to be innocent. In both cases, prevention
(understanding) the catastrophe is (was) prevented by denial and
trivialisation. For an example of a comparison that that goes too far,
but may nevertheless be necessary to make people realise how serious
the current situation really is, see this Guardian
article by Nick Cohen.

For Holocaust survivors, any comparison of anything with the Holocaust,
however indirect and respectful, can be enormously painful. Since I
have never experienced anything remotely like that, one could argue
that I have no right to say anything about it. I acknowledge and
respect that position. In spite of these fundamental problems,
I believe that the current situation is serious enough to
mention global warming and the Holocaust in the same paragraph, even
while denying the validity of the comparison.

If you don't believe me (which would be understandable), imagine the
following
scenario. The year
is 2100. The global mean temperature has risen by 3°C and it is
still rising, although almost all human greenhouse gas emissions have
now stopped. The temperature is now rising for purely natural reasons
(climatic feedback processes) and according to predictions the
temperature increase may not
stabilize until it has reached 6° or even 10°. But even
now,
tens of millions of climate refugees are on the move in developing
countries because of dwindling fresh water supplies and increasingly
frequent crop failures. They are sick and hungry, and thousands are
dying by the roadsides. Their dead bodies are a serious health risk.
Millions are arriving at the borders of the rich countries, and they
are
trying to invade. As they see it, they have no other
choice but to attack: it is a matter of life and death. The rich
countries are also having serious problems because of climate change.
They can hardly feed their own people, let alone millions of destitute
climate refugees. They haven’t got enough fresh water,
either. So
they are secretly developing new techniques to painlessly kill millions
of people and hygienically dispose of their bodies. They, too, claim
that
they have no choice. It is also a matter of life and death for them.
They explain that the situation was created not by them, but by the
citizens of the richer countries (like yours, like mine) in the early
21st century. Those people knew all about what they were doing to the
environment
and the human consequences, but they kept doing it all the same.

Even this indescribably horrifying scenario is not comparable with the
Holocaust, because the murderers in this scenario do not want to murder
anyone. Instead, they feel forced by the situation to become murderers.
They feel they have no choice. The responsibility for mass murder is
shared between those future politicians and us, the people in the early
21st century who may now be making these murders inevitable. That is
the enormity of our responsibility and our guilt, if we don't solve
this problem soon. And according to the IPCC, we only have a few years
left to do it. The IPCC know what they are talking about, and they are
not joking.

It is tempting to think that as temperatures rise
big, cold
countries like Canada and Russia will be able to support more people,
and millions will migrate there to avoid the threat of famines
and
water shortages in their own countries. That may be true in the long
term, but the transition will be far from easy. No country will welcome
millions of destitute climate refugees. Besides, the effect of
global warming may be more negative than positive, even in colder
countries. "According to the Moscow Higher School of Economics (HSE),
the Russian economy’s losses from climate change could rise
to
between US$200-700 billion per year in only a few years. Drought in
2010 and 2012 have slashed Russian grain harvests by up to a third,
generating financial losses exceeding US$10 billion and inflating grain
prices. Georgy Safonov from the HSE has calculated that climate change
will shrink crop yields by 9% by 2030 and by 17% by 2050" (source).

If the above scenario or something equally devastating
doesn’t happen in 2100, it might happen in
2150 or 2200. Today’s emissions will affect global climate
for
centuries to come, according to the IPCC. Two hundred years from now
may seem a long time, but
it is not. The year 1800 is not that long ago. We are talking about
only one tenth of the time between now and the start of the Christian
era.

I am not saying that this is going to happen. I am merely saying that
it is possible, and it is perhaps even likely, based on the best
information that we have right now, which is the latest IPCC report.
And in that case we will be held posthumously responsible. Beyond that,
I am saying that the risk we are currently taking is
entirely unacceptable. We are talking about hundreds of millions of
deaths. If the word “unacceptable” is not an
understatement, I don’t know what is.

Responsibility,
courage, freedom

The above text may come as a surprise to some people. The detailed
argument may be new, but the main point is not. Most of us already
realise that global warming will kill large numbers of people. We are
merely avoiding talking about it.

Remember the Iraq war that started with the US invasion in 2003?
The protesters’ slogan was “No blood for
oil”. But
the war went ahead anyway. As might easily have been predicted at the
start, between 100 000 and 1 000 000 million people died unnecessarily.
No-one knows how many, exactly. In 2003, it was evidently socially
acceptable in some circles to regard one's money as more important than
other people’s lives. Today, ten years later, things
haven't
changed. We are being challenged to reduce our excessive wealth and
profits in exchange for getting global warming under control and saving
millions of lives. We are refusing to do so, and finding all kinds of
excuses. Either that, or we are collectively avoiding the issue in
a global pact of silence.

When will we have the courage to face up to the fact that our emissions
are killing people? When will we be mature enough to take
responsibility for this problem? When will we decide to solve it by
drastically changing our behavior and
consider legal consequences for the worst offenders? When will we start
defending the
rights of our own grandchildren?

We don't have to stop this madness, if we don't want to. We have our
freedom. No-one will judge or punish us during our lifetimes.
We won't be here to witness what our grandchildren say about
us
after we've gone. If we want, we can be completely selfish, cynical,
and bloody-minded. We can just keep going the way we are right now, if
we want. We can keep it up for another decade or two and
try to ignore the mounting signs of impending disaster.

Freedom is important. Where did our freedom come from? Many of
us are grateful to
our grandparents and their peers for fighting for our freedom.
Many of those people gave their lives. We can learn about what happened
at our war memorials; as a Melburnian, I am particularly impressed by
the Melbourne's beautiful and powerful Shrine of Remembrance.
As we remember, we can also ask ourselves: Did those brave young
soldiers give us freedom so we could use it to destroy the world for
our grandchildren? The sacrifice that we are being asked to bring today
is tiny compared to their sacrifice.

There is no point glorifying the courage of soldiers of the past if we
do not follow their example. If they are
observing us from heaven right now, they are surely unimpressed.
Lest we forget.

But the situation is not as desperate as it seems. If we pursue the
military analogy, we find some promising tendencies.

Humans seem to be basically selfish, but we are also
altruistic. People are constantly doing things for other people without
any expection that the others will return the favor. It is happening
all the time in families and in charities. It is surely possible to
extend this wonderful human trait to international relations. Many
countries are doing it already: their armies are mainly
involved
in peace-keeping operations. Austria and Australia are good examples.

Some people say that wars will not stop
until humanity has a
common enemy. There is only one possible common enemy: an
invasion
from outer space. But global warming is also our common enemy, and we
have created it ourselves! Will global warming will turn out to be the
threat that truly united humanity for the first time?

The bottom line

This is not a left-wing website. Nor is it religious. Not that there is
anything wrong with being left-wing or religious – most of my
best friends are one or both of those things. But I prefer not be
categorized in that way.

The only axe that I have to grind is human rights,
which has always
been supported by both the right and the left. I don’t know
anyone on the centre right who would deny that. That is what this page
about – protecting the inalienable rights of a billion
people. Realizing that they exist and taking them seriously, for a
change. It’s about respecting the needs and integrity of
people
whom we don’t know, because they belong to our global
family, our unique species. It’s about altruism, which
is not some airy-fairy idea but a fundamental part of our human nature,
at least according to modern evolutionary psychology. Global warming
will affect everyone, regardless of what political party they support.
I happen to believe in the power of democratically regulated capitalism
to solve this problem. That is not exactly a left-wing position, is it?

Global warming is a horror story that is not happening on TV. It's
real. So
it's important to keep a cool head. The science says that we still have
a good chance to solve the problem. But we have to act. We have to
resist the tendency to give up. We have to recognize the danger of a
kind of psychic paralysis, and rise above it. We can do it, but it will
take a new kind of resolve, social support, and international
collaboration that we never needed or realised before.

To make the urgency of this global challenge clear, allow me to present
the following personal challenge to readers of this page.
It’s a
cliché, but it appears to be necessary. You are either with us
or you are against us. This phrase has been used many
times by many
people, but since global warming possibly poses an unprecedented
threat to the survival of humanity, it was perhaps never more apt
than it is now. The decision to act or not to act is our most important
decision. The rest is detail.

So why am I doing this?

Above left are links to relevant texts that I have written. You may
well ask what
motivated me to write them.

First, as a member of the "top billion", I am one of the lucky ones. I
have
enjoyed an interesting and rewarding life. Most people in the world
have not enjoyed comparable living standards or career opportunities.
My luck is largely a result of the good deeds of other people, both in
my immediate environment and in the past. It's time for me to give back
to the past by giving to the future. In philosophy, that's called intergenerational
justice.

Second, I am personally co-responsible for global warming because the
emissions I have caused during my lifetime are far higher than the
world average. Don't ask me how often I have flown between Australia,
Europe and North America. That makes me co-accountable.

Third, as an interdisciplinary
researcher, I am in a good position to
evaluate and apply relevant interdisciplinary
research.
I also have extensive practical experience of bringing together
representatives of contrasting disciplines to address specific
questions (OUP,
CIM,
JIMS,
ESF,
cAIR).
Global warming involves not only climate science but also philosophy,
sociology, psychology, biology, medicine, agricultural science,
history,
politics, law, economics, ethnology, media studies, cultural studies,
and
religious studies. In an age of specialisation, no-one is an
internationally recognized expert in more than two of these disciplines
(the norm is one). An interdisciplinary academic background helps
when confronting the denial
of global warming in politics and business, the sneaky
tricks that deniers are using, the funding
of denial thinktanks by the fossil fuel industry,
and the sophisticated
nonsense that subsequently appears in the media. Don't
believe anything that is not published in a good
peer-review scientific journal! Academics are in a good
position to contribute
constructively to political discussions and solutions, for example
by presentating clear arguments
and applying the art of critical
thinking. I am not
advocating Plato's
aristocracy,
in which the
state is ruled by "philosopher kings" with "souls of gold". In my view,
there is no
alternative to modern democracy. But because the
training of academics is both publicly funded and publicly relevant, we
are morally obliged to devote some of our time and energy to
the common good. That is why I feel a moral obligation to act on behalf
of
present and future citizens of developing countries. more

Speaking of luck, I also have
the luxury of dual citizenship: Australian (where I grew up) and
Austrian (where I live and work). Where do I really belong? Good
question. Austria is a safe, clean, beautiful, multicultural,
and
sometimes even tolerant country, even if some 20% of people still vote
regularly for
an explicitly xenophobic political party. But from 2000 to
2005, we were
governed by a corrupt and incompetent coalition between centre
right and far right. I wanted to be in Australia, where I had
been raised on the myth
of a classless society
in which everyone was mates - at least on the beach. Now the tables
have turned: Austrian politics have improved and Australian politics
are on the skids. In 2013, Australia got rid of Julia
Gillard, the first prime minister to seriously confront
global warming. Meanwhile, Australians
lead the world in per capita greenhouse gas emissions,
and climate
denial
is thriving. At dinner parties, Australians nod wisely, saying "the
jury is
still out on global warming". Bullshit, of course. It's
time Australians got their act together. Austrians
may not be
much better, but at least we have decent
trains.

I am grateful to my family, friends and colleagues for helping me write
this text and supporting my political projects.

The opinions expressed on
this page are the
authors' personal
opinions. Suggestions for improving or extending the content are
welcome at parncutt@gmx.at.

The
aim of this page is to defend the
basic rights of a billion people who are currently
living in
poverty in developing countries. That's a thousand million people!
Their lives are threatened by a combination of poverty denial and
climate denial. Poverty denial is denial that poverty is caused by the
us, the rich. Climate denial is denial that climate change is caused by
us, the rich.

All over the world, influential people are refusing to
speak openly and honesty about poverty and climate. If things don't
improve, hundreds of millions of people will die in coming
decades
as a result of the negligence of the rich countries. Every human life
has the
same value, and every unnecessary death is a tragedy.

I am one of the lucky ones. By accident of
birth, I am part of today's western middle class.
By comparison to all other people who have every lived anywhere on this
planet, we of the western middle class are living in luxury, like
French royalty before the revolution.

Like French royalty before the
revolution, we are being warned, but we are not responding.
Most of us who read the previous paragraphs (and countless similar
texts) are doing nothing (or almost nothing, which is little better) to
change the situation within our sphere of influence, which is generally
much bigger than we think. We then pretend to be innocent, which is
obviously untrue. Logically and objectively, this "normal" behavior can be
described as stupid, evil, or both.

Please excuse me for trying to tell the truth
about this. Honesty can be a bit of a shock, I know. The rational
response is not denial or guilt. The rational response is to do something.